BAFTA nominations: THE IRON LADY FOR SCREENPLAY?!?!

The BAFTAs, aka the British Oscars, released their list of nominees today, and while it was nice to finally see The Guard and Attack the Block get some recognition (for original screenplay and outstanding debut by a British, respectively), they managed to nominate the worst film of the year for TWO AWARDS. It’s understandable (by comparison) that they’d nominate Meryl Streep for best acress, because hey, she’s Meryl Streep. Even though to me that’s a little like having Lebron James play on a team full of progeria kids and then calling him Most Valuable Player, but I digress, because they also nominated Abi Morgan for her Iron Lady screenplay. Wow. How… is… that even possible? Turning a divisive political figure into an old lady who talks to her dead husband about suits, that’s artistry? Jesus, England. We expect you to have bad food, worse teeth, stupid accents, and men a little too excited to cross dress, but still, you’re supposed to be the smart ones.

Best Film
The Artist
The Descendants
Drive
The Help
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

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I have not seeing, nor will I bother to see “The Artist” because it sounds wicked retarded, but holy fuck look at all those nominations. It is nominated for half the categories and it doesn’t have any ‘splosions in it!

Admittedly I’m not sure how much the finished product has to follow the original screenplay, but maybe the screenplay for the Iron Lady was really awesome and they just screwed it up in the actual filming and editing.

That’s the only excuse I can think of, well either that or the people who choose these things are pretentious bores who think they have to make excuses to legitimize Oscar bait for the sake of the arguing “filmmaking as a legitimate art form and not just a bunch of studios trying to make money.”

The Brits seem to have got most of this right. I’m still surprised that – love it or hate it – Tree of Life isn’t seeing nods in cinematography or direction or even Special Visual Effects. Shit blew my mind, son.

The Iron Lady is just the same old movie about an uptight white person who learns to forget themselves and be the life of the party, but done non-linearly. Clearly all it is is a Burroughsian cut-up of Bringing Down the House with General Pinochet in the Queen Latifah role.

Matty, look at the first two award categories…Best film and outstanding British film…The only British film that was also nominated for best film is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy…as in none of the others were good enough in their mind to be included with the best films regardless of origin….logic then deduces that Tinker Tailor should win most outstanding British film.